


Draconic Drabbles

by esperance



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dragons, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Unreliable Narrator, is cauthons name stolen from the Wheel of Time? perhaps.
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 14:31:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20909210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esperance/pseuds/esperance





	1. Chapter 1

Papers fluttered in the aftermath.

Calamity; plain and simple.

Avis’an moved towards the skeleton structure with a serpentine grace, scales rippling as he swept forward into the dust & ashes.

This husk had been a home once- some small smattering of years ago that seemed as if decades past- marked by toothy grins and comfortable silences that had haunted the walls long after she left. He had not been able to stay once she was gone, too afraid of the spectres that had stalked shadowed halls, and unwilling to linger lest he become one.

It would not have been too bad a fate; better to be consigned to memories than to oblivion.

He dug his talons into the crumbling earth, soot coating them in a dusky grey that leeched away both colour and shine from the normally glossy hooks.

The structure itself had been hewn from rock in an age even she could barely recall- a cavernous chamber marred by deep cracks in the surface that stretched outwards into narrow halls compounded by long veins of quartz that ran along the walls from its gaping heart.

The structure itself lay in ashes, centuries lost to fires on a scale unseen by any since the third age, scorched cavities in the stone left exposed to the air in the absence of any bulwarks. Still unobserved in all likelihood- Couladin had ever been the coward, moving by cover of night and hiding behind a poorly crafted veneer of grandeur that never quite buried the bitter stench of decay.

One of the greats- Avis’an would not stoop so low as to deny him that- but one fallen deep into disarray, a twisted reimagining of that which he once was.

A sharp shake of the head dispelled his uneasy thoughts; It was neither the time nor place and it would not do to dwell on that which had long since passed.

Behind him something stirred, a soft billowing sound that barely managed rise above the airs heavy hush. Cauthon. With a final lingering look at the ruin of his once abode Avis’an grimaced, an odd melancholy thing filled with as much yearning as derision.

Wishful thinking at its finest.

The moment fled, and a caustic crowing voice led his focus astray.

“How strange to find you around these parts again, I’m sure that our dear old mother would be delighted to see you,”

Flashing his teeth in a testy grin, Cauthon stepped to the fore, eyes glinting much in the manner of embers trapped in a hearth.

“Weren’t you meant to be doing something about that, brother?”


	2. Chapter 2

It was a terrible decision, one that I wish I had never made.  
  
That which I wrought was not done in cruelty- I must insist that even now- but I will admit to some faint satisfaction at its immediate effects, a youthful spite that would cost me dearly. Leaving with such suddenness may have been callous, but at the time it hardly seemed unjust; I had felt hurt, and without proper recourse thought it only fair to make myself scarce.   
  
(_That which followed… I can hardly stoop so low as to even attempt some pithy justification, knowing its consequences as I do. Hindsight is no gift to me, and as time passes it has become wont only to salt the wound._)  
  
In Cauthon’s parting- one more permanent than my own- I chanced upon the bitterness so typical of our line, blood left only to me after the wake and all the more concentrated for it. His absence was conspicuous to one so young, so close, yet in others I observed no such reaction- something which left me the impression of maladroitness, if not an outright malefaction which has been belied only in retrospect. With such thoughts in mind, I grew wary.

For days this restlessness dogged me, tainting conversation and leaving me avoidant; I was unwilling to linger in their presence for fear of speaking my mind- though I have come to recognise the foolishness in this elusion with increasing incredulity as the years pass me by.

(_Perhaps_\- I think, hesitant and hateful, half-drunk on the hope- _perhaps then we would have found a better way; this is not what was promised to us._).  
  
Eventually the confrontation came, and eventually I left.  
  
My departure was a quiet one, gone in the night some hours before the claws of dawn dared to grasp at the sky. It was not premeditated, but it was inevitable; Cauthon’s own flightiness redefined in me, all sharp comments and a frantic energy that has long worn at our kind. To this day I wonder if it was ultimately what felled him too, grinning with a knife to the neck.  
  
If my mind was a maelstrom, my steps were the storm- indiscriminate and indecorous. Where once I had traversed these towns a spirit, I began to wander as a wraith, hindering as much as I had ever helped.

  
In the end it is the silence that rends, the unspoken becoming the unspeakable.


End file.
